Unity is an engine primarily used by mobile app developers; it’s their biggest market. Indie game developers are basically just collateral damage, for this kind of a pricing change.
Mobile apps are all about massive scale (millions of installs) and ungodly amounts of revenue. They’re going after large mobile developers, not small studios. (I’m not saying small studios won’t get affected, I’m saying Unity is focusing on the big dogs - potentially at the cost of pissing off unrelated folk for no financial reason)
The per install costs don’t kick in until you’ve made half a million dollars in revenue, and a certain number of installs.
Also, you literally can’t build these apps with other engines as ad network integrations don’t exist for them. So it’s not like anyone has a choice: it’s Unity demanding to be paid more as they’re the only viable player in the industry.
Makes good business sense, though I think they should increase the revenue point of the free and personal tier to a million as well, just to put the minds of indie devs at ease. No point freaking out unrelated people.
I would never call such horrifically predatory tactics “good business sense.” It’s abuse of market position and should draw the ire of antitrust regulators, as well as make their product a major business risk for any new projects.
Let’s not forget that Unity recently merged with a malware company, so borderline-illegal predation is their entire business strategy.
Let’s not forget that Unity recently merged with a malware company, so borderline-illegal predation is their entire business strategy.
No, they merged with an advertising company - you know, the same companies with which they’re close enough to have plugins for. It’s about business; who you talk to, who you have deals with.
I would never call such horrifically predatory tactics “good business sense.” It’s abuse of market position and should draw the ire of antitrust regulators, as well as make their product a major business risk for any new projects.
It is good business sense. The engine has relatively little value, it’s about what software stacks it integrates with, plus the ease of use for making exports to the two platforms that matter (Android and iOS). There’s a reason Unreal doesn’t even exist in this space, even though it’s technically capable of running on these devices.
Again, this is not the industry you’re thinking of - it’s the mobile industry, which is less about game development and more about having millions in your war-chest (usually from a few VCs) that you can spend on your marketing budget. If you can’t market, you’re dead in the water.
The entire industry is built around ads in games and traditional social media.
Things like this will stop happening if:
A) People become less susceptible to predatory marketing.
B) Another game engine developer decides to undercut Unity while at the same time offering similar platform targets and SDK integrations.
(There’s also a thing to be said about hiring, where all new mobile-game devs learn Unity - as it’s become the de-facto standard for getting a job in this industry. Any new player would need some big names to adopt them first to make a push for people to learn the tools, not hobbyists.)
Barring that nothing will change.
Also, there really aren’t “new” projects in this field - you rarely see scrappy upstarts succeeding in the mobile space, just jaded veterans undercutting their old studios by offering their VCs (or new, hungrier VCs) a bigger cut of the pie. Also, studios with private chefs, massive salaries, and cult-y work spaces that look like adult playgrounds.
“Good business sense” = they are greedy shits. Fuck them. I wont ever praise any company for cash grabbing. I dont give a fuck if their shareholders get richer.
It’s not gonna stop. They’re literally just a holdings company that has publicly said they will always act to maximize shareholder value. That’s it’s. That’s all they do. they’re not a game company.
“That being said, I want to call out the way Unity chose to communicate these layoffs. Receiving a 5am email from ‘noreply@unity’ informing me that my role was being ‘eliminated’ and that I’d lose system access by the end of the day felt completely abrupt and impersonal. Unity must do better in how they treat their workers in hard times like this.”
Oh the irony, they are almost there. Trying to appeal to empathy and humanity of a corporation in the same breath that they acknowledge the lack of it.
There is no humane nature intrinsic in corporations. People need to stop humanizing it. Treat it like It is, know that you are being taken advantage of, you are being squeased, extracted of every value you can give and then discarted.
The arrested Roblox developer was later identified as Mikhail Jacob Olson, also known as Simbuilder. Per the Chronicle, Olson was taken in (and later charged) for having a concealed firearm in his vehicle, along with “possession of armor-piercing munition and a large capacity magazine activity.”
Fuck, the dude was ready to commit mass murder. Anyone got more details on him and/or why he might have wanted to kill people there?
Do you know how little that narrows it down? There was also the controversy around them essentially exploiting free child labor - www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ
That really doesn’t do anything at all to explain why one of the devs would get arrested for brandishing(?) A handgun. Literally conveys no other information other than “Roblox devs bad”, same thing is true of the rest of this thread now that I think of it.
Like just going off the title, that could be describing a would-be mass murderer who got foiled as easily as it could be describing some guy who just forgot to take off his conceal carry and the wrong person realized before he did.
I have to wonder what kind of ammo that is really, I’m a firearms enthusiast and have never seen armor piercing ammo for sale anywhere. Pretty sure it is illegal everywhere.
The three patents—all filed in Japan between May and July 2024—draw similarities between Palworld and 2022’s 2022’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus specifically. Their descriptions concern game mechanics like “riding an object” or throwing a ball to capture and possess a character in virtual spaces.
Wait…so the patents didn’t even exist when Palworld was released into EA? or am I missing something?
You’re not, but there’s a preexisting patent, and these three are basically extensions of that patent.
Essentially, Palworld needed to know what supplementary patents Nintendo was going to file in the future in Japan so they didn’t run afoul of the patent from the past. You know, textbook legal psychic stuff, really. /s
I hope Nintendo hurts itself in its confusion as its lawyers flail before the Japanese courts.
There was an article from years back, I want to say around 2019 or so on then-Gamasutra, about how it was already too late to stop the bubble from bursting because all of these games are trying to get everyone’s attention (I’m having trouble finding it now). Now the bubble is bursting, and big games these days have dev cycles of about 5 years, putting us right here in 2024. Get dev cycles to 3 years or less so that you can actually react to changing market conditions, and charge a fair price for a good product. Maybe sequel it or otherwise make regular old expansion DLC. That was sustainable. No one even makes a multiplayer game anymore unless it’s intended to be rigorously competitively balanced or suck up all of your time and money through grinding.
Get dev cycles to 3 years or less so that you can actually react to changing market conditions, and charge a fair price for a good product.
This industry’s already killing people with overwork and stress. Increasing the time pressure isn’t going to improve the quality or bring the price down.
We don’t need faster game development, there are already more games out there than anyone could play. We (the market) need to encourage quality over quantity.
The industry kept making games bigger that would have been better off if they’d stayed smaller. I’m not saying to make the games they make now in less time. I’m saying stop making games that take 5 years to make and instead make games that take 3 years to make.
You’ve described the AA/indie scene which took the chunk of the market big publishers abandoned including whole genres of games.
The problem is investors saw the line go way up, passing even Hollywood so to keep it riding forever they apply Hollywood-sized solutions.
Except you can’t just shuffle live services a few weeks around another so you can milk the box office. They want us to spend all our time in their game services so people will pick one game for a time so they are cannibalizing each other and eroding trust as games fail and abandon the players that did buy into them.
And what you’re describing is the economic realities of a bubble bursting, which means they have to pivot to making something sustainable that the market actually wants. That doesn’t mean AA or indie exclusively. It does mean smaller scope. Halo and Gears of War could be created much faster when they were linear games, and now they’re both open world and arguably worse off for it.
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